Politics

Seven years ago Malcolm Turnbull’s assessment of CCS was that it was an industrial pipedream. He said it was sobering that “as of today, there’s not one industrial-scale coal-fired power station using carbon capture and storage – not one”. This week Josh Frydenberg pointed out that government has invested $590 million in CCS and said it is now being successfully employed in three overseas power plants. But a closer look shows the lessons learnt from those plants mean its use has already peaked.

Turnbull’s problem is he comes to the fray politically weakened thanks to his one-seat majority. It denies him clout in dealing with the hostile senate. ‘They can’t really govern,’ is the conclusion of one Liberal veteran. It’s certainly not in Shorten’s interest to make life easy for Turnbull, to just let go through everything the government bowls up.

Morrison’s sales pitch still looks like it is coming from a government at war with its own past convictions. There is something dissonant about a Liberal treasurer talking about the banks “fleecing their customers”. He is, after all, a treasurer who still argues against the need to hold a royal commission into the economic power of the banks and their use or abuse of it.

One of Malcolm Turnbull’s inner sanctum was upbeat as journalists pored over the details of this week’s budget. ‘Labor’s got nowhere to go,’ he said. Judging from his demeanour in the Parliament House lock-up, Treasurer Scott Morrison shared this view. Or, more accurately, hopes this view was shared by his colleagues and, most importantly, the voters in coming weeks’ opinion polls. Make no mistake: Morrison’s fate and his prime minister’s hinge on just how well received is their spectacular political pirouette.

On Tuesday night at 7.30 Treasurer Scott Morrison will preside over the burial rites for the economic belief system that has guided the Liberal Party for 25 years. Gone is the dogma that the market knows best and the national interest is optimally served by small government and budget surpluses.

Malcolm Turnbull has put his prime ministership on a war footing. It worked for a similarly besieged Liberal PM 16 years ago, and it’s definitely worth a shot now. The image of a helmet-wearing, Kevlar-vested Australian leader scurrying out of an RAAF Hercules in Kabul was the perfect visual accompaniment. It nicely reinforced his conflation of migrant workers visas and citizenship with fighting terrorists and national security just five days earlier.

With both Abbott and Latham seemingly determined to alienate as many as possible who had supported or believed in them, the start and end points of their parabolic rise and fall neatly contain a period of Australian history in which we lost belief that our existing institutions and structures could produce the sort of movements and figures that had driven earlier political eras.

Turnbull’s visa crackdown certainly got the media talking about something else other than the government’s Abbott-fanned internal divisions. That almost certainly accounts for the announcement’s timing, even though Turnbull insists the government has been working on the issue for at least six months.

There is no denying earlier gains lost as neoliberalism took hold and more public services were cut or privatised. Two years ago, a number of NSW feminist women’s refuges founded through radical action lost government contracts and were handed over to various religious organisations. Like many other older radicals I was jolted by how smoothly the transition happened. A few younger radicals offered to occupy refuges but the workers were reluctant. They feared the services would be lost altogether or for their jobs and future employment.

Turnbull is caught between the wily billionaire Gautam Adani and the hyperventilation of the Nationals prepared to give the businessman whatever he wants to get the giant Carmichael mine project in Queensland going. And, by the way, assist other billionaires such as Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart develop their stakes in opening up the Galilee Basin as a gigantic new coal precinct.